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Thank you, Bill, for the friend request. If I did this right, I added you to my list and I think I requested to be added to yours - still learning how to do this, but I think I got it right. The honor is mine, brother.

Yup! At age five I saw a meteor storm (the Draconids 1946 storm), with somewhere near 60,000 meteors and hour for several hours (commonly called "falling stars") and I was forever hooked on astronomy after that. I got my first (and last scope) during the last apparition of comet Haley, an 8" catadioptic reflector. I paid $2,200, but actually it was a gift because I"d just gotten a $2,500 dollar "rebate(?) from our utility company for making a couple of houses I was building at the time 'all electric' with geothermal.

I bet you can get a lot for $700 these days. Mine has a drive motor - which doesn't work now - but is not computer guided.

Here is a post I made titled Sixty Thousand Meteors per Hour talking about that and some other things at a forum provided by Astronomy Magazine. I recommend that you go to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore and pick up a copy; it's a monthly magazine. Whn you click on my link, at the top left corner you'll see "magazine" click there for more the magazine has to offer amature astronomers. I've subscribed to it since 1979, and have every issue. I'm trying to cut living expenses and stop, but I couldn't make my self stop and went for another year.

If you have an I-Phone, or if your wife has one (mine does), there is an astronomy APP called Sky Safari that only costs $1.99 and is really great. For instance you could open up Jupiter and get minut by minute images of the Galilean moons in their orbits, the full array, and can get close or back off by just tweaking the screen. The Galilean moons are actually binocular objects.

I hope you are somewhere where you have clear skies. In recent years the ambient light from our nearest city, Bloomington Indiana, has become very limiting. But there's a lot more to observing than the telescope.

This month, February, a gibbous Venus will be within 3º of a crescent moon close to the western horizon on the 25th. Also Venus the evening star (in Pisces) will be only 0.3º (rhat's just 20-minutes) away from Uranus on February 9. Look for it after sunset. Uranus will be blue-green, visible through a scope, and the largest nearby object to a gibbous Venus. It will be below or toward the horizen from venus, but very very close. You will be able to see it with binoculuars too.